


Koutali

by CapricciotheSpoon



Category: Cav Fanbots, Steam Powered Giraffe
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Who thought this was a good idea, kinda funny but super cursed, kinda unwholesome middle sorry about that, mom friend???, uh kinda gross just warning you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:08:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28357506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CapricciotheSpoon/pseuds/CapricciotheSpoon
Summary: Koutali was murdered. And yet, over 20 years later, he lives! How to explain such a vast disparity between the times? Read on, dear viewer...(Note: this is the uncensored version. There is a censored version on my account as well if you'd rather read that)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	Koutali

**Author's Note:**

> I've got to thank the wonderful people on the Cavalcadium Discord server for continuing to inspire my weird fanbot stories. They really mean a lot to me and I appreciate having an open ear whenever I want to yammer on about my bots for hours and hours. Love you guys out there <3
> 
> Final warning, there is a censored version of this I've uploaded if you want the gist without the gore. I know not everybody wants to read that kind of stuff...

He was once Koutali Terracciano-Spyridatos. Who he was now, he had no idea. He had lost his humanity. He was, quite literally, a shell of his former self.

Koutali was living life to the fullest, enjoying his life as a chef at his family’s multigenerational restaurant in Vicenza, Italy. Working alongside his grandparents, parents, and younger sister Pirouni, the restaurant was big business in their part of town. Koutali took life down a different path, though. While he was a wildly successful chef he was also part of a local mob. His duties were menial, low-ranking members never got the ‘good’ jobs, but it was enough to make enemies of a few powerful people. When in one mission that went particularly awry his identity was revealed and his enemies began to threaten his family. Koutali couldn’t stand it, they were completely innocent, and took their offer that if he left Italy never to return his family would be safe. 

And so Koutali moved to America in the winter of 1996, hopeful that a fresh start would help erase his mistakes of the past. He set up shop in a town in a little Midwestern town hoping that being on the other side of the country could help distance himself from what he left behind. Opening up a traditional Vicentian Italian restaurant that began to grow in popularity in the following years. He became a rather influential member of the community, well-liked by everyone for his welcoming nature and kind demeanor. Unfortunately, as he grew in popularity his image began to spread. In early 2001 his business had attracted the attention of some of his former nemeses, a group of civilians whose families had been, well, let’s just say affected by Koutali’s actions in the mob, and they set out on a vendetta. 

Koutali wanted to let bygones be bygones. Sure, he had a questionable past, but that was years ago. He was a different man now, a better man. When the news came that Pirouni had been murdered it hit him like a brick wall. They promised his family would be safe. They never went back on their word. And that got him theorizing, what if it wasn’t a member of the rival gangs? What if it was someone else, an unaccounted-for variable? That would be dangerous, he had no protection from wild cards. 

It was only a matter of time before he was tracked down by his enemies. After closing up shop one night, before he could realize anything was happening, he felt something hit the back of his head and then nothing. He had been shot at the base of his brainstem, instantly killing him. And in an instant everything he had worked for in America was lost.

His body was left to rot in a drainage ditch. His life, as he knew it, was completely over. Nobody close to him ever found his corpse, an honorary funeral was conducted within his community and his restaurant was kept open in his memory. His family back in Italy never even knew he had died.

\-----

Now, Koutali’s saga was not over with his death. Not by a long shot. Sure, he was a mangled corpse in a sewer drain, but his soul was still there. It just so happened that a week or so after he was deposited in the ditch a certain someone happened to be taking a walk down a trail nearby. This ‘certain someone’ was former-Walter Worker Veronica Callisto’s great-granddaughter, Lisa Callisto. The Callisto name, along with Veronica’s family trade of creating mechanical beings, was passed down through the family and Lisa had grown up working around all sorts of mechanics and electronics. She was always unorthodox in her works, though. Instead of making purely mechanical beings like the rest of her family she thought she could harness the soul of a being, even if it were deceased, and create a new life for them as a robot. She had only ever experimented on animals before (and never anything more beloved than roadkill and one feral coyote) so moving onto a human would be an ordeal but he was dead. Finders keepers and all that. She figured the corpse had been out there a while and there hadn’t been any reports of missing people or police searches so hey, it’s free real estate. Sure, the body was beginning to decay and smelled to high heaven but she figured that whatever had succumbed to rot could just be replaced. She’d dealt with worse corpses before, but the fact that it was a human did hit her a bit different.

Fortunately nobody else happened to be walking the trail as Lisa lugged the bloated corpse back to her car. She was rather nervous on the ride back to her house, a pile of old grocery bags and an emergency blanket in the shape of a human slumped over in the back seat was a little bit suspicious. And she dared not open her windows for fear that the smell of decay would pervade into the cars surrounding her on the road. ‘Rotting corpse in a hot car’ would be a smell she never quite got out of her mind. 

Upon arriving at home she immediately set to work on making sure the body wouldn’t decompose any further. Whatever blood was left inside him was drained, replaced with a chemical slurry designed to flush out whatever toxins had entered his system in the days he lay in that ditch and to prevent new ones from taking their place. Plus, it smelled nice.

Days of experimentation followed, severed body parts and half-built mechanical replacements littering the garage. She never had learned the identity of the mysterious man and decided to give him a nickname while she worked on him. Koutali became Stephen, the name of Lisa’s first pet. In a way, the man was quite like the original Stephen, he never talked, ran away, ate anything, complained, anything of that sort. It’s also important to note that the original Stephen was a rock with a face painted on it.

It took years to replace all the badly-damaged parts of him. Months not just to find a semi-legal way of disposing of human remains, not just to actually make and weld the parts, not just to dissuade the rest of her family from going into the garage, a whole plethora of factors she usually was used to dealing with but now dialed up to 11. Stephen looked less like a human and more like a machine with every passing day, but Lisa did what she could to preserve as much of his humanity as possible.

The crowning achievement of the whole project was his brain. It was almost perfectly preserved somehow: she kept it in an old pickle jar in the garage fridge while working on the rest of his body. She had made tests of her pseudo-nervous system with controlled electrical bursts but now she felt ready to bring the real deal out. At first it smelled vaguely of pickles, not exactly the highlight of her morning, but a flush of the antitoxin sorted that issue out soon enough. Connecting the brain to her intricate mesh of preserved and artificial nerves proved a difficult ordeal, particularly with the complexity of the human brain over the pigeons she’d worked on before, but a steady hand and a plethora of anatomy books made up for what she lacked. 

Soon it was time to test the brain out. A series of electronic pulses directed to stimulate certain pathways of the brain, that’s what she’d read could work. And it did, on a small scale. She was ecstatic when she could get an eyelid to twitch, or a finger to contract. The full thing in operation at once? Stephen becoming a person again? That seemed like it was eons away.. Everything else in his body worked, every part crafted with over a hundred years’ worth of Callisto expertise, but if the brain couldn’t function then everything else would crumble. 

One late-night session she finally cracked the code. September 16th 2011, 3:24 AM. She was just about to give up, over 38 straight hours of testing was getting to her. Surely at this point she should have slept, but she had one more idea come to her and figured she had time for one more attempt. It worked. The brain had neurochemical electricity produced on its own that managed to power multiple systems throughout the body. This was the ‘eureka’ moment that she’d been waiting so long to find.

By exploring this new procedure more she came to figure out how these seemingly unconnected systems and processes were more deeply intertwined than she thought. She got to the point that he was almost conscious for a few moments. This Frankensteinian project was nearing its light at the end of the tunnel. One seemingly normal day she switched his brain on and he just kept running, almost completely stable. 

She was shocked, he had never stayed on for this long, and by reading his vital signs she could tell that he was in some way awake. Life after death.

“Stephen, can you hear me?”

\-----

Koutali’s head throbbed. But it also didn’t. He could recognize the feeling as pain but it wasn’t like anything he’d ever experienced. He couldn’t feel his limbs either, well, yet again he could but in an unfamiliar way. 

A voice began to cut through the silence, a sort of muddy, ringing sound that barely registered as words. Soon the voice became crystal clear, almost painfully so, and if he could have moved he was sure he would have winced. The voice was calling to him, asking him if he was alright, but that wasn’t his name. He was Koutali Markellos Rodino, not Stephen. Was this a dream? No, it felt too real to be a dream. And yet it seemed so ethereal…

He tried to speak but his words were garbled. When he tried to breathe to speak again he realized his chest wasn’t rising and falling in the same way it usually did. And whenever he breathed it felt like his torso got warmer internally. The faint scent of smoke carried through every exhale. 

Suddenly he was aware of a woman’s face in his vision. She looked disheveled, her hair barely contained in a fraying bun, oil smudges on her dirty apron, the outline of a pair of goggles in dust on her face. She looked concerned as she stared at Koutali with a large needle-like probe in her hand, ready to use it in case of a neurochemical emergency.

The voice rang again.

“Stephen, are you there?”

“W-who are you?” 

The words were shaky, unsupported by mind or body, but they were intelligible. Lisa dropped the probe, mouth agape, as she realized that her work had all come to this one moment. 

“I’m Lisa, Lisa Callisto. And you, you’re alive!”

“Of course I am, why wouldn’t I be?”, he responded in that same shaky mechanical tone from before.

“Well,” she laughed nervously, “that’s a long story.”

\-----

Lisa set to work attempting to teach Koutali to live again with his new mechanical body. She was shocked when he told her his actual name, she’d been calling him Stephen for nigh on ten years and Koutali was a fair bit different than that. 

He didn’t know how to come to terms with the fact that to everyone who ever mattered to him, he was dead. He’d been dead for ten years. It wasn’t like he could go back and explain it to anybody, the court cases with Lisa and illegally taking a dead body, how he would explain his new appearance, he couldn’t even contact his family in Italy to tell them he was alright. He had no future.

That is, until Lisa had an idea. She had gotten her robotics skills passed down through her family from her grandmother, an employee of a certain Walter Robotics company. From the stories her grandmother told her the manor was fully equipped to support robotic life so it seemed like the perfect place for him. And fortunately for the both of them the manor wasn’t even a half day’s drive from where Lisa lived.

She basically dropped him off at the doorstep, leaving her home number and address with him in case of emergencies (even though he was a grown man Lisa had begun to treat him like her son). He never felt like he fit in with the other robots, having not been built for some grand purpose or even built fully robotically. While the others may have tried to take him under their collective wing he never quite felt at home enough with them and took to a life of solitude instead. Until he met the others.

Tip, Siren, Nacarat, Spoon, Luxine, and all the others, they forced him out of his apathetic zone of complacency. He was bitter at them for a good long while, he didn’t like being forced into social situations with other bots, but he began to warm up to them. He didn’t like to show it but he was beginning to care about them. He couldn’t look to the past any longer, now was time to look to the bright new future brought by his new family.

**Author's Note:**

> I kinda suck at writing, I know, but I've hardly ever shared my works with other people. I'm just happy to finally be getting my stuff out where people will read it, even if it's not the best thing you've ever read.


End file.
